VMware Expands Its Cloud Management Muscle To Public Clouds

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VMware has given its cloud management portfolio a big-time makeover over the course of the past year, and now it's touting itself as a market leader that can manage and monitor pretty much anything happening in data centers and public clouds.

On Tuesday at its VMworld conference in Barcelona, VMware unveiled vCloud Automation Center 6.0, a major update that includes technology from last year's DynamicOps acquisition, as well as some pieces developed in-house.

VCloud Automation Center 6.0 handles provisioning of infrastructure, apps and desktops, and custom services through a self-service portal. With new technology, it now works with devops tools like Puppet to address the infrastructure and apps for cloud automation, Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's cloud management business unit, said in an interview.

"Developers want choice, and they don't want to be force-fed a certain type of provider. The vCloud Automation Center 6.0 release allows IT and developers to come to a single central portal that gives visibility into what's being requested and the costs associated with that," Sayar said.

Jamie Shepard, regional vice president at Lumenate, a Dallas-based VMware partner, said vCAC 6.0 is helping customers move to more of a consumption model.

"IT is supposed to be the new 'service provider,' and if moving certain workloads to the public cloud is something that is required to satisfy the business, then why wouldn't you just extend your virtual investment and move them to and from?" Shepard said in an email.

VMware also is touting a new product called IT Business Management Suite 1.0 Standard Edition, which provides visibility into vSphere workloads running on the Amazon Web Services public cloud. This is important because many AWS customers tend to underestimate the amount of capacity they're using and end up paying more than they expected, Sayar said.

ITBM 1.0 works in conjunction with vCAC 6.0 to let customers see "the true costs" of running a vSphere workload on AWS versus on-premise, said Sayar.

VMware plans to add ITBM 1.0 support for Windows Azure "early next year," he added.